The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (53 page)

The ten thousand who witnessed the formation of the league that day were not, of course, all men. Women and children were among the crowd, and it was Ellen Young who once again chose to represent the voice of the whole people in Ballarat's only newspaper. In her letter Ellen highlighted the collective nature of popular disaffection on the goldfields. This is what she had to say:

However we may lament great misdeeds in high places, justice must be awarded to the universal demand of an indignant people—the diseased limbs of the law must be lopped off or mortification will ensue the whole body. Thus would I speak to our Governor…Oh Sir Charles, we had better hopes of you! We, the people, demand cheap land, just magistrates, to be represented in the Legislative Council, in fact treated as the free subjects of a great nation.

Not ‘request'. Not ‘humbly pray'.
Demand
. And it is not Kennedy, not Black, not Holyoake, Humffray, nor Vern who committed their name to a declaration so inflammatory, so presumptuous, but Ellen Frances Young. No pseudonym. No anonymity. Others had publicly spoken of
cleaning out
but none had gone so far as
lopping off
. The irony of the gender inversion was not lost on Ellen herself.
Is there not one man, Mr Editor, to insist on the above demands?
she provoked.
And if refused, let us demand them of England
.

Ellen's indictment of masculine courage and foresight was printed on 18 November, the first edition of the
TIMES
to be published after the Bakery Hill monster meeting. It is likely that this edition was in fact edited and published by Clara Seekamp, who used her editorial influence to propel Ellen's equally radical departure from feminine rectitude into the public eye. When Clara's common-law husband was subsequently tried for sedition, the editions in question were those printed on 18 and 25 November, and 2 December. Henry Seekamp argued in his defence that he was not responsible for the management of the paper at that time. Later scholars have speculated that John Manning, a teacher who worked at St Alipius with Anastasia Hayes, or George Dunmore Lang, the embezzling bank manager, may have been the true authors of the seditious articles. It is more probable that the highly literate and intelligent Clara had her finger on the pulse and the pen of the newspaper that was issued from her house. As we shall see, it was widely acknowledged that she took over editing the paper following Henry Seekamp's arrest in early December.

Clara and Ellen may have had good reason to feel hostile towards their fellow freedom fighters. The Ballarat Reform League was constituted as a membership organisation, with a one-shilling entrance fee and a sixpence per week subscription. Significantly, the membership was to be gender exclusive. It's not clear exactly who wrote the association's rules, but the effect was to turn Ellen's
people
into Boynton's
men
. This is in line with the trajectory of British Chartism that saw the early goals of political equality sacrificed to a trade union model based on a male head of household supporting a dependent wife. It was a retrograde move that the unbiddable women of Ballarat strenuously resisted.

Raffaello Carboni alerts us to this drama playing out in the wings of Bakery Hill's centre stage in one of his typically obtuse asides:
Bakery reformers leagued together on its hill [No admission for the ladies at present]
. Why would Carboni specifically, if parenthetically, note the omission of women from the Ballarat Reform League's membership? In 1854, would we not assume that women were to be excluded from the formal body politic? And what to make of the qualifying phrase
at present
? So for now women cannot get a 2s ticket to the league, but, Carboni seems to imply, it is not out of the question that they will be eligible in the future.

Is this because certain women were requesting, maybe even demanding, inclusion? Was it only a matter of time before women would wear down the formalities of political convention and find themselves on an equal footing with their male co-conspirators? They were, after all, writing op-eds, topping subscription lists, starting businesses, buying property, financially supporting families, working beside their husbands on the fields, owning shares in mining ventures, speaking their minds freely, making ample use of the judicial system to assert their sovereign rights, throwing off the mantle of restrictive clothing, drinking, fornicating and otherwise behaving like perfect men.

It is the line of Latin that directly follows Carboni's reference to ‘the ladies' that gives the crucial clue:
Durum sed levius fit patientia
. The reference is from Horace,
Odes
1.24. The entire line is:
Durum: Sed levius fit patientia/Quicquid corrigere est nefas.
‘It is hard: but whatever is impossible to set right, becomes lighter by endurance.'
¹⁴

Which ladies fought for, lost and were forced to ‘endure' their struggle for political inclusion? Ellen Young? Anastasia Hayes, who later took on the Catholic Church over the issue of fair wages? Mrs Rowlands, who attended the monster meetings? Sarah Hanmer, who was contributing more coin to the Diggers Defence Fund than anyone else in Ballarat? Jane Cuming, who named her daughter Martineau after the renowned liberal philosopher and feminist? Thomas Kennedy's wife? Christina McIntyre, whose wrongfully accused husband was up on charges of arson? Fanny Smith, who in 1856 would agitate for universal municipal representation on behalf of
myself and many other ladies ambitious of a seat in the Local Legislature of Ballarat
?
¹⁵
Dorette Welge and Ellen Flemming, who in 1855 would marry Adolph Wiesenhavern and William McCrae, proprietors of the Prince Albert and Star hotels, where members of the reform league held their meetings? The wives of other nonconformist British and European radicals who had, in partnership with their husbands, travelled to Victoria to seek political refuge from the sort of conservative atavism that that would see the French revolutionary universality of
liberté, égalité, fraternité
reduced to the chauvinist dogma of the Paris Commune?
¹⁶

It is clear that something more than manhood suffrage was envisioned by at least a vocal minority of goldfields possum-stirrers. During the Bendigo Red Ribbon Rebellion of August 1853, William Dexter took the stage to argue for
women having votes as well as men
. It was William's wife, Caroline, who would bring her bloomer costume and lectures on women's rights to Melbourne in January 1855. William Howitt, who witnessed William Dexter's inflammatory speech, dismissed the French-educated man's
cosmopolitan doctrines
as the
peculiarly revolting
cant of
ultra-republicans, those maniacs of revolution
.
¹⁷
But Dexter was no raving lunatic. He would stand for the Victorian Parliament on a platform of universal suffrage in the elections of 1856, with his wife in campaign mode.

So too would a young man named Thomas Loader, who stood against John Basson Humffray in the 1856 elections for the seat of North Grant, covering East Ballarat and the Eureka Lead. Loader styled himself as a
Liberal Australian Reformer
and pledged, if elected, to introduce such reforms as are
peculiarly requisite in Australia, arranged upon liberal and progressive principles
. Loader's policies included
rights of women
but he hedged his bets about suffrage.
¹⁸
He was trounced anyway.

But such concerted public action by women, or on behalf of women by sympathetic men, constituted what the historian June Philipp has called ‘both a plea and a threat'. Raising the spectre of women's political enfranchisement—their constitutional entitlement to civic rights, their elevation in status from moral compass to helmsman—cast doubt on the power and status of deeply entrenched norms of social and political behaviour. This was truly revolutionary, and the Australian people would have to wait another forty-eight years before the passage of the
Commonwealth Franchise Act
in 1902 made their nation the most democratic in the world. The internationally unprecedented legislation gave (white) women full political equality with men: the right to vote and to stand for election to parliament. America would not pass the constitutional amendment that ensured these liberties until 1920 and British women would not enjoy such rights until 1928. Aboriginal women (and men) would not be fully enfranchised until the 1960s.

Catherine Bentley was one woman who was definitely not clamouring for membership of the Ballarat Reform League in mid-November. The only acceptance she needed was from a jury of her peers. On 19 October, Catherine had been arrested after her former employee, Thomas Mooney, turned Queen's evidence and claimed the reward of £300 for information leading to a conviction in the Scobie murder. On 1 November Catherine was transported to Melbourne, where her husband had been apprehended.

Not everyone was thrilled by this development. There were those who, like Ellen Young, believed that the Bentleys were being unduly scapegoated for wider feelings of
envy, hatred and malice
towards the corrupt Camp officials and those they winked at. Certain merchants, storekeepers, diggers and residents of Ballarat and Melbourne got up petitions to proclaim James Bentley's good character and innocence of any crime. One of the jurors at the original inquest signed a petition to the effect that
there has been heaped on Bentley's head a greater amount of odium than he at all deserves.
¹⁹

But none of this could avert a show trial to demonstrate the Crown's impartiality. Catherine would have to take her starring role in the cast. Even so, a journalist for the
ARGUS
reported with alarm that when Catherine was conveyed by steamer from Geelong Prison to Melbourne to stand her trial, she was handcuffed all the way. Her keeper, Detective Cummings, refused
even to allow her to get dinner
regardless of the fact that she was by now seven months pregnant with her second child.
Mrs Bentley has been moving in a respectable line of life
, chided the journalist.
She is not convicted of any offence, and it is not likely that she will be.
The only cause to justify
such harsh treatment
and
cowardly brutality
, argued the journalist, was
the supposition that it was
in accordance with the public feeling to heap insults on a defenceless woman
. Cummings' behaviour was
an insult to the community
, especially as the public sentiment aroused by the case evinced
not so much a virulent hatred of the alleged offenders as a mark that the people of the colony will not stand for the abuse of power and privilege by judicial authorities
.
²⁰
Others similarly came forward to declare that ‘the Bentley affair' was simply the last straw in a long line of baleful examples of disregard for the rule of law by the Ballarat authorities.

It was Justice Redmond Barry who would preside over this morality play. On 20 November there was a solar eclipse. Commentators attributed the freakishly mercurial weather—hot one minute, storms the next—to this astrological phenomenon. The packed public gallery at the Supreme Court didn't need to look into the sun to be dazzled by the strange alignment of events. Only two days before, Ann Quin had been arrested in Melbourne in connection with the Bank of Victoria robbery, Eliza Smith was brought in for all those stolen notes stuffed into her stockings and now here was another of Ballarat's daughters in the dock. And that night, another Irish Protestant Catherine, the internationally acclaimed chanteuse Catherine Hayes, would make her final appearance at the Queen's Theatre just down the road from the courts.
The lady was as rapturously encored as ever
, reported the
ARGUS
,
greeted with a shower of bouquets and with volleys of cheers and other manifestations of delight from the audience
.
²¹
Catherine Hayes was reputed to have cleared over £10,000 from her two-month tour of Sydney, Melbourne and the diggings. The only volley Catherine Bentley would receive was of jeers as she entered the court.

Three hundred diggers came to Melbourne for the Bentleys' trial, but it proved anti-climactic. The most scintillating drama occurred when Catherine was given a chair during her cross-examination in order to rest her swollen body. Dr Carr, who was there to give evidence, assessed the exhausted woman's condition and Justice Barry called an adjournment for Catherine
to have proper attention
from the doctor. (No newspaper reported that she was pregnant.) Apart from that, there were no shocks, scandals or bombshells to entertain the crowds. The circumstantial evidence was piled up against the Bentleys. The best John Ireland could do for the defence was to ask Mary Ann Welch whether she had any ill feeling towards Mrs Bentley that might have motivated her testimony. No, said Mary Ann. In the end, Ireland could only plead that his clients had already
suffered enough
in losing all their property and being held up to
public execration
. And he subtly pointed out that, if anything, the bulk of the evidence was ranged against Catherine Bentley.
If found guilty of this most serious charge
, Ireland told the jury,
they must expiate this accidental calamity by death, involving too the life of a woman
.